Building the Fabian Church of the Future

Early English Debates in Marxist Value Theory

Vulgar
Socialism under construction: Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw hammer
Africa and Asia.
[The Fabian
Stained-Glass Window, designed by Shaw, 1910. London School
of Economics.]

In his Preface to Volume III of Capital,
Engels publically remarked that "Mr. George Bernard Shaw" was building
"the Fabian Church of the Future" on "the foundation of Jevons’s and
Menger’s theory of use-value and marginal utility". Indeed, the Fabians
saw themselves, quite consciously, as building a socialism not just
different from Marxism but in opposition to it: ''there are at
the present moment four people in London, calling themselves
'Socialists', who claim to have refuted our author [i.e. Marx]
completely by opposing to his theory that of - Stanley Jevons! ...'',
Engels told Danielson in 1888. He was almost certainly referring to the
participants in the Fabian sponsored value debate whose contributions
we reproduce below, together with Shaw's memorandum on 'Fabian
Economics'. This is the first time all these articles have been brought
together and published in any media.